Do panel companies bother to manage their panels? #AAPOR

One of yesterday’s #AAPOR sessions focused on data quality of online panels. One of the speakers posited that maybe panels don’t know or don’t care about their management. This could not be further from the truth.

I’ve been on the management team for several national and global panels, and have also worked with a number of panel managers from competitive panel companies.

The amount of care and expertise that these people put into managing their panels is astonishing. On a daily basis, these folks are analyzing and trying to figure out how to respond to things like
– tenure: how long have people been on the panel as of today, which demographics have been there shorter and longer
– response rates: what are the newest rates by survey, by demographics, by survey category, by client
– supplier health: depending on where a panelist was sourced from, do any suppliers give better or worse data or panelists who stay longer on the panel
-data quality: what people are providing better or worse data, by source, by category, by everything
– invites: which demos are getting more or fewer invites, who is being ignored or bothered

And of course, all of these data, and many more, factor into panel rules dictating how many invites individuals are allowed to receive, whether that rule needs to be changed temporarily or permanently, whether it needs to change by demographic or by source.

You know what, perhaps it would just be easier to read the ESOMAR 28 questions document that most panel companies have created. The moral of the story is that just because you aren’t familiar with what the companies are doing, doesn’t mean they aren’t doing it.

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I'm a market research methodologist who blogs about sampling, surveys, statistics, charts, and more. I also like to live blog conferences I speak at. My goal is to keep research real, current, and fun. I approve and post every single comment that makes it through my spam filter, usually within 24 hours.